I just went out as I normally do to get on the road and noticed that the door had been jimmied open, breaking the plastic around the door lock and denting the door. Looking into the truck, the console had been opened and the glove box was hanging open with its former contents spilled onto the floor of the cab. At first I thought someone had just broken in to burglarize the truck. As I got in and looked around to see if anything of value was missing, I noticed that the ignition had been destroyed with a screwdriver or similar, which meant someone had tried to steal the truck. There was nothing else missing that I could see. I guess everything was opened to try to find any keys, cash, or guns.

I called the police to file a report and a crime scene officer came to collect prints, which I expect nothing will come of. But, he did mention that Ford F-250s like the one I have are popular targets. They often end up abandoned near the Mexico border. The seats ripped out to make it easier to smuggle people across the border into the US, which conjured all sorts of visions of desperate figures huddled in the dark cab of my old truck, crammed together like a college prank. The guy who fixed my ignition cylinder told me of an image he saw once of 20 people crammed into the cab of a Ford F-150, which has less than half the interior space of a truck like mine.

It’s easy to become scared or discouraged, but it made me feel better that my vehicle was probably targeted rather than the possibility that there is just someone out there trying to steal a vehicle opportunistically. That feels more vulnerable for some reason. It’s a small distinction, but it helps me. It means that I can take steps to make my truck less attractive to this community of thieves looking for trucks of my type, who are acting on a dubious, but ultimately rational basis. I can tolerate being a victim of a rational actor more so than an irrational, pure opportunist. If that makes sense.

But, my circumstances have changed. Many things that once scared me and drove me, have collapsed down to smaller proportions. The more I ran toward my own fears, the smaller they became, much like my own shadow. I still have fears and worries, but my worries are concrete and I am more grounded. And, after much work devoted to untangling various knots and maybe just making friends with the knots, I started to reconnect.

One of the first things to go, when you disconnect from yourself, is any creativity or sensitivity. When you detach from your own feelings, you develop a state of numbness because you want to avoid anything that might overwhelm, which could be anything when you’re holding it all down with white knuckles.

But, once I started to be more happy, I wanted to find out more about myself. I wanted to build a timeline of my own life, mainly because I could not remember much for long spaces of time. Even if I could remember the facts of my past, it didn’t feel like it belonged to me. I grew interested in knitting together a sense of my own story. I wanted to explore my own inner world that I had boarded up and abandoned. I wanted to move back home, I wanted to clear away the weeds, open up the windows, and dust out the various corners.

I came up with a plan to kickstart this inner exploration: floating in an isolation tank. Floating in complete darkness and silence with nowhere to go and nothing else to do; just alone with my own thoughts. If you’ve seen the William Hurt film, “Altered States“, you’re probably familiar with the concept. Luckily, Austin has a place where you can purchase 60-90 minute sessions of sensory-deprivation, Zero Gravity Institute. I don’t feel like saying much about it, except that you might give it a shot. The first session I had was very rewarding. After adjusting to the novelty of the situation, I had some of the most creative moments in recent memory. That’s where I arrived at the realization that it has been exactly 20 years since I started a small zine with two of my high school friends. It was called the Incredible Flaming Mechanism. We created 7 issues from 1994-1995, when we all went off to college. It was one of the most creative, exciting times in my life. I realized that I was coming full circle… from happy to unhappy to happy again and from creative to uncreative to creative again. So, my current idea is to do 7 more issues… from 2014-2015, so that I can close the loop. What do you think?

There is a tendency in superhero films to make everything too glitzy, too polished, presumably so that we think the superhero world is cool and fantastic. Maybe so that it seems so unlike reality. Maybe so that we can leave the mundane behind. But, I find that this makes it harder for me to become involved in the film.

The more polish and glitz, the more details there are to bring me out of the story and the characters. The more aware I am that we’re in a world that bears little resemblance to the real.

Superhero movies often belong to the “more is more” school of film-making. Take “The Avengers” as a recent example. Widely praised and loved by fans and critics, it’s ultimately a weak and forgettable film. In “The Avengers” there is an all-star team of superheroes (including a god), flying aircraft carriers, and an enemy from another dimension. All these things are true to the comic book, but it’s so over the top that it stops being interesting. Where can you go in terms of story? Maybe things which make sense in comic books stop making sense on film. Comic books being a low-resolution medium with lots of completion necessary… it makes sense that you need to punch things up to make things compelling. But in a film, it’s just too much. I don’t care. I can’t care.

“Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts, the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others, but of the three the only trustworthy one is the last.”